Above: Software engineering trainees at the Code Fellows boot camp in Seattle.
A Seattle entrepreneur who graduated from Troy High School and the University of Michigan is taking steps to open a Detroit branch of the 18-month-old digital trade school she leads as chief executive officer.
Kristin Smith: "We hope to make a bigger pipeline of talent . . . and to help people improve their lives and careers."
Kristin Smith speaks about her plans with Sherri Welch of Crain's. They met at the publication's Detroit Homecoming conference two weeks ago.
Seattle-based Code Fellows LLC has set its sights on opening a Detroit location by next summer to help meet local demand for web and mobile developers. . . .
"It's a matter of when we open in Detroit, not if we open there," Smith said.
During her mid-September visit, she "met with organizations offering incubator and co-meeting space and with the Detroit Economic Growth Corp. and its vice president of business development, Olga Stella, whom Smith said she knew in high school," Welch reports.
Smith, 39, is contacting area employers as a first step in developing the local training Code Fellows will offer in the Detroit market. . . .
Code Fellows . . . teaches people to write code through three levels of courses that add up to four months of training that costs $12,000. . . . The company guarantees that within nine months of graduating, its graduates will get a job offer for at least $60,000 per year or Code Fellows will reimburse tuition. . . .
Smith became CEO of the West Coast firm four months ago. She earned a 1998 master’s degree in operations research and industrial engineering from the University of Michigan, where she was an undergraduate, and has two masters from MIT. She spent eight years at Amazon.com.
